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On Monday, November 12, Marvel comic writer Stan Lee passed away at the age of 95 due to pneumonia, while in the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California.

Lee is most well known for being the writer and creator of several famous Marvel comic book characters, such as Spiderman, the Incredible Hulk and the Fantastic Four, to name a few. Lee was most well known for giving the characters he created not just superpowers but attributes that made them imperfect and human, people that the readers of his work could relate to.

Though Lee eventually made it to the fame he has today, it wasn’t an easy climb.

In the beginning, Lee was born in 1922, the child of two Romanian immigrants who brought him up in Harlem and the Bronx. Early on he developed a love for the adventure genre, specifically the works of Errol Flynn and William Shakespeare. Lee would eventually get a job at Timely Comics on the same day as the release of Captain America, a Marvel character he didn’t happen to create. He initially started off by fetching coffee and keeping ink wells topped off, but after two years, his patience would be rewarded when he was promoted to editor.

Later on, Lee would bear witness to the comic panic of the 1950s, which would see comics blamed for juvenile delinquency and be burned inside churches.

Due to this, Timely Comics had mostly collapsed, and Lee was forced, along with a few others, to move to the Empire State Building in a small office where they would attempt to continue to run the company. In that transition period, Timely Comics changed its name to Marvel Comics.

At the new company, Lee and illustrator, Jack Kirby, created a spark in the comic industry–that spark being the Fantastic Four. After that the rest is history.

It seems that Stan Lee’s life story was just like one of his comic books, a character who had human struggles, trying to overcome obstacles posed by a greater force, but ultimately succeeding in the end. He gave readers heroes they could both relate to and aspire to be like. With his great imagination, he himself inspired others and paved the way for many other famous heroes.

In the end, Stan Lee will always live on, within the hearts of his fans, and so will his famous words, “Excelsior!”